Builder’s blog

What A Relationship Needs To Succeed

"If we were endowed with the same biological mating pattern as the [pair-bonding] goose, there could be no polygamy, no promiscuity, no celibacy, no harems, no group marriage, no trial marriage, and no divorce in any human community in any part of the world." and "The gibbon's 'very low sex drive' is a reminder...[of the fallacy] that pair-bonding is based on sexual attraction."
- Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman, Bantam 1972

The article title refers mostly to male-female relationships, though the first reason could apply to any relationship, including friendships. Let's examine that first reason.

Why so many relationships fail is simply that few people know what makes a relationship work. A large part of that has to do with the fact that living conditions for most people today are so different from those in the past.

In my country, Canada (numbers for the US are similar), a century ago 85 percent of the population lived in the country, in rural areas. That left only 15 percent in cities, despite what we hear and read about lots of people in cities in those days and very little about those who lived "off the land." Those numbers are reversed today.

Today 85 percent of North Americans live in urban areas, have access to everything cities have to offer, but miss out on so much that was good about rural life. Country living is simply not available to most people, for reasons beyond their control. More importantly, what was good about rural life in the past has not been replaced sufficiently by the good of city life today.

In agricultural areas and in areas where most people made their living from resources in the past, people had few enemies. They needed each other. Everyone people knew had value. No one knew when they might find themselves at the side of the road with a broken wagon wheel, homeless (or barnless) because of a fire, in need of someone to fetch the doctor in town but unable to get there for having to look after a sick child, or any of uncountable possible emergencies.

Rural people often needed someone else to help them. They couldn't afford to alienate others they may need to help them one day. Few rural people had money to spare, so volunteer help meant drawing on the goodwill of friends and neighbours, who were often one and the same.

Kids learned in their families how to get along with others because they had to. Sure, they had fights, many physical, far more than today. But they learned to make up after a fight and get on with their lives. Friends were often combatants of the past who made up so they wouldn't have to live as hermits without any friends in areas with few other people around. Grudges were rare because people couldn't afford to have enemies living nearby.

Today people in cities believe that most of their needs can be satisfied with money. We hire people to do whatever we need done. Friends are often workmates, fellow church parishioners or other people life brings together frequently. We may know our neighbours little more than on a nodding acquaintance basis.

Friends tend to be those from whom we can derive some benefit, such as people where we work or fellow club or church members. When it's clear that these people can no longer provide us with any benefits or potential benefits--they or we change jobs, one leaves the club, one moves some distance away--the friendship dissipates with the disappearance of the potential for mutual support. Friends have become another form of object in the throw-away society. There are always more people become friends with in a city. Of course this generalization, like all generalizations, is not true of everyone and not necessarily entirely true of any one person.

Because of this impression that anything we need can be bought, we have allowed ourselves to lose the feeling of needing others in times of tragedy. In the process, over a period of decades we got out of the habit of teaching our children the skills of making friends, of keeping friends through all adversities, of knowing what makes a friendship work. Again, that's a whole society, not necessarily true in every family.

Though most of us now see more people in a day than our ancestors of a century ago saw in a month, we tend to have fewer close friends, people we can count on when the going gets rough, when worse turns to worst. We no longer teach relationship skills because they were not taught to us. We don't know what to teach because most of us don't even realize there are great gaps in our knowledge about relationships.

To make a friend, you have to know how to be a friend. To find a good mate, you have to know how to be a good mate.

The second reason most relationships fail is that we don't know our obligations in a relationship. We know what we want from others, but we give little or no thought to what they may want or need from us to maintain a healthy relationship. As relationships are two way affairs, when one person feels no great commitment to the other, the relationship fails or wanes away at the first crisis.

For any relationship to succeed, each person must believe that they contribute more to the success and health of the relationship than the other. The perception of an imbalance is usually not real because we don't fully appreciate what the other contributes. But if we perceive that we contribute more to a relationship than we receive and we can be comfortable with that, the relationship has a chance.

The best examples of why relationships fail is demonstrated by the staggering divorce rate in western countries. A husband or wife believes that the other is not giving what they used to, that their own needs in the marriage are not being met, that the spouse is "not the person I married." It's usually true. However, what most people fail to appreciate and understand is that their own commitment to being a devoted spouse may be equally weak.

You can't be a good husband or wife if you have very little idea of what is required of a good husband or wife. Ironically, we all seem to have pretty good ideas about what is required of the other, our mates, even if we don't know what is required of ourselves.

The third reason why relationships fail has to do particularly with male-female relationships. Especially the requirement of fidelity in a marriage or common law relationship. If there is one thing we have taught each other and our children about marital and marriage-style relationships it's that each partner should be monogamous.

The trouble with that is that there is nothing in our natural or evolutionary history to support that. Humans, like all the great apes, are genetically and hormonally programmed to spread their genes as widely as possible. That means that men are genetically programmed to want to bed as many women as they can. And women are programmed to find as many healthy males with whom to procreate future offspring as they can.

Many people will find those last two statements offensive. But why? Nature didn't teach us to be monogamous. Religions did. Religions even decry (in some cases even threaten death to participants of) male-male and female-female relationships. Why? Because those who formed the religions knew that most gay men are still capable of passing along their male genes to fertile females, just as most lesbians have the ability to give birth to children, can be impregnated by healthy males.

Religions, in the past, wanted desperately to expand, to enlarge their congregations, to increase their power as unelected bodies of social influence. That meant, in addition to sending out missionaries and conquering other cultures and nations by war, encouraging their own followers to have as many babies as possible. The financial ability of parents to raise children, the likely health of the children and the knowledge of parental skills held little importance compared to the lust for expansion. What was important was numbers.

As a result, homosexuality was forbidden and banned, while having large families was encouraged. To keep order among the families of congregations, religions dictated that families should consist of one adult male, one adult female, and the only other adults allowed would be those who could help to tend to the children while the parents were busy creating more or working to support the ones they had. Polygamy and infidelity were considered sinful because the resulting "families" would be hard to manage, to control.

Science doesn't care much for the word monogamy. It likes "pair-bonding." You have heard of animals that pair-bond, that stay together for life, through thick and thin. Like geese--most examples of pair-bonding are birds, including northern gannets and penguins. However, the only pair-bonding along our branch of the evolutionary family tree is the gibbon. Though gibbon mates are totally devoted to each other, they are comparatively anti-social. They have little to do with other gibbons or other animals of any kind. They keep to themselves.

Gibbons, like other pair-bonded animals, have low sex drives. Not an attractive characteristic for us humans. In fact, sex is of so little importance among pair-bonded animals that some gibbon couples are homosexual and some heterosexual couples do not engage in sex. Do we really aspire to pair-bonding for ourselves? We should see pair-bonding as it really is in other examples in nature.

Let's switch back from the term pair-bonding to monogamy. Monogamy, while a charming and attractive concept in certain contexts, is fundamentally unnatural for us humans.

If monogamy is unnatural and many people insist that they could never live with a mate who is "unfaithful" (i.e. not monogamous) then the marriages and marriage-like relationships that depend on monogamy will likely fail. Estimates in the US of infidelity among married men range around 85 percent, while most estimates of infidelity among married women range between 65 and 75 percent.

A priest commented to me recently that it's up to each member of a couple to fulfill the sexual and other needs of the other so he or she doesn't need to go looking elsewhere. Good idea in theory, doesn't work in practice.

If a marriage depends on monogamy, that makes sex the most important component of the marriage, literally the tie that binds. There are two things wrong with that. One is that a marriage must be based on much more than sex or it doesn't have enough to sustain itself. The other is that few people with a lower sex drive than their partner feel compelled to engage in sex and its accompanying gestures and procedures if they don't feel like it. They may not want to have sex, even if their partner does, but they also don't want the "needy" partner to go out and have sex elsewhere.

It may not be the actual act of infidelity of a partner that results in the breakdown of a marriage, but the attitude of the mate that feels "cheated on" who feels the partner should be something he or she was not naturally programmed to be.

Few "unfaithful" partners want to break up their relationship. They just want to be fulfilled in ways they can't get at home. Nature tells them to find it somewhere else.

A wife who says "You may be the perfect husband in all other ways but you can't be faithful to me, so you must get out of my life" (even though she can't give what the husband needs sexually)--reverse the gender words if it applies--can be the partner who makes the marriage fall apart. If doing what nature dictates and what all other primate animals do causes a marriage or relationship to fail, then the marriage was not well founded in the first place.

We humans have the ability to use our intellect to overcome our natural inclinations. Few of us use that ability. Every war that ever was, most murders, almost every person behind bars in a prison or jail and almost everyone in a mental institution or on mood altering drugs give an abundance of evidence that we tend to give in to nature much more often than we overcome it using our intellect.

When following what comes naturally to us causes a relationship to fail, there is something wrong with how the relationship is constituted. That is, we don't know what a close human relationship is, what it should consist of.

When you don't know what you're doing, expect something to go wrong. It will. If you want a relationship to succeed, you need to learn what the other person needs and how you can fulfill that.

A successful relationship means two people each committed more to the welfare and happiness of the other than they are to their own. That's hard. But no one ever said it was easy.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers, parents and grandparents who want to give their children what they need at each stage of their development, rather than leaving it all to chance.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Our Own Shame

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

This would apply today to television and movies as well.

Instead of doing what we must to see that our countrymen avoid behaviours we consider shameful, we complain about the books, movies and television programs that show everyone who and what we really are.

We complain about what is wrong, but we don't change our system so that we teach what we believe is right and good.

Changing our education systems would be easy, literally as easy as the stroke of a pen. We have lots of good people in every community that live the kinds of lives we consider ideal in a moral sense. They are the source for new curriculum material for schools.

And it's cheap because teachers would not need new books, AV materials or computers to teach it. Teachers already know this stuff. They only need the authorization to teach it. All teachers would need is material provided in a curriculum guide.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to enact change in their education systems to address problems that run rampant in their communities and even in their homes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

How Public Schools Fail Us Tragically

"The social, emotional and spiritual are part of a child's connection with the world."
- Mary Paradis, director of development at the Vancouver Waldorf School

Why doesn't every child deserve the kind of education kids get at some private schools? The schools I refer to--Waldorf and Montessori are among them--teach the whole child, not just curriculum dictated facts and skills.

Children develop along four main streams: intellectual, physical, emotional and social. Mainline school systems address the intellectual and physical needs of their children, but curriculum seldom leaves time or room for social or emotional/psychological development. At that, intellectual development follows strict guides and physical development varies hugely from school to school and among various districts.

What would those strict guides be that schools follow? Education systems, in general, are designed to produce future employees who can do the jobs that big employers such as industries need to be done. And they produce consumers who will buy, use, throw away, then buy more of the products those industries manufacture.

Schools produce employees and consumers. The evidence is so glaring that those who argue against the claim have difficulty finding evidence of support. In fact, those who argue that schools are not designed to produce employees and consumers of the future delude themselves and try to persuade others so they don't feel so alone. If you doubt, just look at what topics fill school curricula and the young adults the schools produce.

Ironically, many of the leaders of the industries that employ public school system graduates themselves attended private schools. Is this true irony? In fact, no. Private schools, in general, prepare children to be leaders in their communities, not followers as public school systems do.

Providing "the right thing at the right time" in a child's learning development is the key to teaching to the whole child, according to Ryan Lindsay, president of The Waldorf Association of Ontario. Public schools, on the other hand, provide indoctrination of facts and skills in the employee-consumer model at the time most child have the ability to manage them. Those who are not ready fail--emotionally, if not by repeating school years--drop out when they reach the minimum age, often believing that they are too dumb for school. They try to work for large companies so they can depend on a steady income.

"We make sure we focus on teaching children how to think and not what to think," according to Lindsay. "We like to think we are laying the foundation in a more thorough way so that when children get to a certain age the approach aids their intellectual development."

Casting aside the lack of expertise you may feel regarding the topic of education as a whole, if you attended a public school do Mr. Lindsay's statements ring a bell about how you were taught? From what you know of adults today, do they know how to think, not just what to think when they make purchases?

We must keep in mind that private schools have the same number of teaching hours in their days as public schools. They don't have eight-day school weeks. Private school students are in class roughly the same number of hours as public school students the same age. Sometimes less if they have special assignments that take them outside the classroom.

What's the difference?

Some may claim that public schools have many more problem children to deal with than private schools. From my personal experience as an educator, I can see that argument having some merit. I also know that classes I taught in public schools had far fewer "problem children" than many of the other classes in the same schools.

In my teaching years in public schools, it was the teacher in my classes who kept getting into trouble, not the students. In my case I kept wanting to deliver to my kids what they needed and wanted and were desperate to take in and develop, not just what was on the curriculum. I believe my mission was to grow whole people, not just adults who were ready to be employees and consumers. I did. Administration often objected.

In general, classes with "problem children" do little to address their emotional and social needs. Consequently their problems tend to be emotional or social in nature--bullying, depression, fighting, shyness and so on. Where children have intellectual development problems--slow learners--very often the slowness of intellectual development relates back to emotional or social problems of the past.

And often to emotional or social problems of the present. How efficiently can we expect a child to learn if he or she has problems with a drunk or abusive parent at home, with a classmate or neighbourhood child who bullies them to and from school or on the bus, with a parent who does not provide a home atmosphere that supports what is taught at school, or even with the results of a recently broken close friendship?

For a child, emotional and social problems always take precedence over intellectual challenges in school. Always. It's how we are built. Emotional and social problems are related to our individual ability--our basic instinct--to survive. For our ancient prehistoric ancestors, intellectual development and learning took place when survival and personal safety and comfort were not at stake.

Most private schools address the social and emotional needs of their students. "I could never say enough good things about the value of community in a school," says Karen Murton, principal of Branksome Hall, a private school for girls in Toronto.

If a child can't get enough help with social or emotional development at home and his school doesn't have the time or the authority in its curriculum to address these needs, where does he get it, where does he turn to fill in the blanks he knows inherently he must fill? Television. Movies. Video games. Rumours picked up in casual conversations with peers. "Information" gleaned from overheard adult conversations behind closed doors and at parties.

Please consider that list carefully. Your child, or at least many of the children in your community, derive most of the emotional and social development information they receive from these same sources. Are they the sources you want young people to take as models? Think about their content.

Public schools could provide factual input, but most don't. They have the same amount of time with their students as private schools, but public schools spend their non-curriculum time dealing with created problems rather than teaching what the kids need to know to prevent them from happening.

One kind of school deals with kids who may already be broken. Another teaches what kids need to avoid breaking.

As astonishing as it may sound, addressing the emotional and social needs of children would not be a costly change for public schools. Most teachers already know this stuff and just need some direction, guidance and the authority to teach it.

If private schools can grow men and women who can lead major industries, professions and governments, public schools should easily be able to grow men and women who can think for themselves, who are more than mere automaton employees and consumers who work and buy as they are told.

If you believe what you have just read, then your family, your community, your world needs you to speak up about it. Only by speaking up will you find how many others think like you so that we can all work together to make life better for the future.

If we don't talk about this, we leave industries to manipulate their way into the lives of every student of every public school.

That's simply not acceptable.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, teachers and other interested people who want to know what children need to learn and when, not just what industries want them to be taught and how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
- Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic, activist (1909-1943)

I have never met a person who, as a child, wanted to grow up to be a criminal, a drug addict, a gulper of prescribed drugs, a divorcée, a workaholic, a gambling addict, an alcoholic or a wife beater. Nor have I ever heard or read of one.

Yet somehow so many of us grow into these roles in life.

Are we a society of losers?

A recovered alcoholic, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, considers himself a lifelong addict. Does that mean we should consider him a lifelong loser and treat him as a social pariah, as human detritus?

If not, then how should we think of and treat such people? How, indeed, should we think of and treat those who still "suffer" daily with their affliction? Is it even possible to have our governments provide sufficient assistance to help a significant number of them recover? Many people believe it's not possible.

The subject of helping people to recover from their life problems is so enormous that most of us prefer to not think about it. "It would just cost us more taxes." Of course those people don't realize how much of their taxes already go into dealing with the social problems these people create, including the cost of health insurance and maintaining prisons and rehab facilities for them. Some estimate that figure as high as half our taxes today.

We don't want to face up to the fact that society has failed them. Especially because we have no clue about how we could have failed them. Fair enough. Let's worry about what we can fix.

Now return to my first sentence. We, as parents, as teachers, as relatives and neighbours, grow our own children from scratch. They learn what we teach them.

They learn what we teach them. They learn what we teach them. So let's teach them what they need before they need it. Before they break.

Too many of us believe that children should be kept in innocence for as long as possible. Such people are wrong and dangerous to society. The whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to cope with the rigors of adulthood. Not to turn childhood innocence into adult ignorance. A child that doesn't learn as early as possible about the pitfalls as problems of adults is doomed to fall victim to them and not have any defences at the ready.

We have long established traditions for teaching children what they need to know. One is called schools. The other is called parents. If that sounds patronizing, remember that these are the primary sources of education for children, all children. In a Canadian study of teens a few years ago, 89 percent of them claimed that most of what they learned about life came directly from their parents.

In general, schools are not allowed to teach what kids need so that they can cope with the rigors of the adult world they are growing into. Schools are directed, by curriculum and policy, to teach what kids will need to be employable, to be good employees. However, schools suffer from the lack of need satisfaction in the teens they teach through discipline problems. Students who can cope with their problems suffer from loss of classroom time when the troubled kids act out.

Most young parents know little or nothing more than what they learned about parenting from their own parents. Which is grossly insufficient. Which dooms their children to develop the kinds of problems mentioned at the start of this article.

New parents whose goal is to be better parents than their own parents were to them are lucky. They know they need to do something different. Unfortunately, they don't know what to do. They know what they want to be different for their kids, but not necessarily how to achieve it. They have no easily accessible source for that information.

Western societies are extremely lucky that they don't have more social problems than they do. They must be doing something right. After all, western societies have few problems with terrorism, war and other forms of rampant violence found in other parts of the world, parts that claim that parents do know what they should be teaching their children. Maybe not.

No matter where in the world you look, social problems abound.

Does that mean that social problems are unavoidable? No. It means that, in general, people in all parts of the world have no clear idea what to teach their children to help them cope with life in the 21st century.

Sadly, the last time our ancestors did have a good idea about what to teach their children to help them to cope with life, they all lived in tribes. In tribes, the social norm is that every adult bears some responsibility for teaching every child. As little changed from one year to the next, from one decade to the next, knowing what to teach children was adopted as social policy for the tribe. Everyone taught children the same things. Every child got the same message.

We don't do that today. If anything, parents go out of their way to make sure their kids don't grow up like other kids. That's a social norm. Everyone should be different, we believe.

Yet everyone is the same in many ways. We all have the same needs, for example, with few exceptions.

Schools address the needs of employers. Parents address the needs of their children so long as they know what those needs are. However, so many of the needs of children are unknown mysteries to many parents. Most parents learn parenting "on the job."

Many parents don't teach their children about drugs for fear that the kids will "experiment" with drugs. By the time the parents decide to teach the kids about drugs, the kids have already learned about drugs on the street, in the schoolyard, in the parks, virtually everywhere they go. Some kids already take drugs by the time their parents decide it's time to teach them about drugs.

How's that for timing, for knowing what kids need and when?

Why would a child, an adolescent, an adult need to turn to drugs? Simone Weil said it's an attempt to fly from emptiness. What's empty?

Better to say that human needs have gone unfulfilled. The need for fulfillment of needs is what is empty.

Does that sound like psychobabble? That's what many people would say, people who don't know what children need at all, let alone when they should learn stuff that will fulfill their needs. Ignorant people often have strong opinions against evidence that they are ignorant.

It's true that children are not small adults and should not be treated that way. If they were, we would have to punish them for offences they didn't know were offences. For misdeeds they did because they didn't have the words to explain to their parents and teachers what they needed. For bad stuff they did out of frustration because they needed something they couldn't talk about, but adults didn't know either so they ignored the needs of the children, thinking they were just misbehaving. Yet that is what most punishment of children is about.

A child needs to know how to deal with every social situation he experiences. We know that for adults, so we provide ways to teach them social skills, sort of. Few children receive any significant amount of instruction about social skills. They learn the hard way, by making mistakes. Or by watching what happens when other kids make mistakes.

But that is teaching what not to do in social situations, not what to do proactively, before the information is needed. We need to teach social skills to children, to address their social development when they need it most. They need the skills before they need to put the skills into practice. In teaching skills to children, especially social and emotional skills, timing is critical.

We also need to address their emotional development. Huh? Why do so many adults experience heartbreak when a relationship with a mate who is incompatible with them breaks up? Why do more than half the couples who marry get divorced later? That number should be even greater except that many couples today skip the wedding part and simply live together until they separate later because one of them "failed" the other or they "grew apart."

Understanding emotional skills and knowledge is part of what we need to get along well with others. As a social species, we need to have social interactions with others. In most activities people do--either personal or work related--they need to interact with others.

Socially and emotionally well adapted and developed children and adolescents become socially and emotionally well adapted and developed adults. Moreover, socially and emotionally successful adults are not only well liked and appreciated, they do a great deal to help others in their families, their communities and their countries. They gain great public respect because they do things they seem to understand--almost intuitively--are right. Nobel Peace Prize winners, for an example.

Teaching to the social and emotional needs of children and adolescents is not hard. We simply have not put into place the mechanisms for doing it. The needs themselves are not secrets, they're public information. Unfortunately, most of that information is contained in psychologists who specialize in fixing broken people rather than in teaching everyone before they break. And in sociologists who manipulate us by advertising, religion and politics because we don't want to listen to what they know otherwise.

While we long for innocence, what we get is ignorance. There is nothing pretty or beneficial about ignorance.

We have schools, but we use them almost exclusively to train children to be successful employees, not successful adults. The change would be easy and cheap, but someone has to make the first move in every community.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow socially and emotionally well developed and balanced children, not just intellectually well developed employees.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

ADHD: You or Someone You Love Could Have It and Not Know It

My sister had Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) all her life and took it to her grave. I might have had it, but a strange trick of fate at birth caused me to have its opposite. A nephew had all the indicators for ADHD when he was a baby, but his mother sidetracked him from it and he may grow to be a genius as a result.

Before going further, we must establish a few ground rules about discussing ADHD. First, nothing about the human brain is well understood. Nothing about it can be diagnosed and cured or changed easily. Nobody is an expert on the human brain and no one should be believed because he or she claims to have such expertise. We should listen to all points of view before making decisions. This article makes no claims to perfection, it seeks to present a different point of view about a seemingly intractable problem.

However, if we look at ADHD from a different point of view, we may find that it's not the problem that is intractable but our approach that doesn't allow us to see the problem for what it really is.

Nothing about the human brain is cast in stone in terms of being inevitable or unchangeable. Medical hypotheses about the brain have almost always turned out to be wrong. They changed, they evolved, but they were wrong at first. Even now, after extensive research having been conducted for several decades, no one can say anything about the human brain with absolute certainty.

It's easier to prove the existence of God and the non-existence of good science than it is to make definitive and irrefutable statements about the human brain. I have done both--at least to my own satisfaction--yet the brain continues to mystify me and the "expert" statements about it stagger my imagination. Some, I am convinced are just plain wrong.

How, then, do I dare to write an article about one of the great brain mysteries of our time, ADHD? Because when we look at the situation from a non-conventional perspective--one we should be using but don't--ADHD is not a brain problem but a problem of social inadequacy. And, if I may be so candid, social ignorance.

ADHD may indeed be shown to be different from other brain conditions in the sense that those who suffer from it may have brain structure that differs slightly from that of those who don't have ADHD. And ADHD may be shown to have family connections. But it may begin with an inadequate start at intellectual development of a child, not with a physiological difference. In adequate intellectual develop and opportunities for young children may very well run in families without a genetic connection.

Parents who do not know or understand the intellectual needs of a very young child, who may not therefore address the child's early intellectual development, may pass these inadequate parenting skills along to their own children. Most young parents learn most of what they know about parenting from their experiences with their own parents. "I lived through it, so I can do it myself."

Named for its symptoms rather than its discoverer (Alzheimer, Hodgkin) or its genetic markers (H5N1, H1N1), ADHD is a collection of behaviours by which its sufferers are identified. Wikipedia describes ADHD as a "neurobehavioral developmental disorder," which is psychobabble for what it further describes as "persistent pattern of inattention or hyperactivity—impulsivity that is more frequently displayed and more severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development." More psychobabble.

What does it mean?

A child who is punished for demonstrating socially inappropriate behaviour in a social setting may become outraged at the thought of being punished for something he believes is not his fault. When a child is "out of control," it should be taken as a sign that the parent has no idea what the child needs rather than that the child is "just plain bad." Punishing an out of control child is like punishing a slave for his master's failures. Abolishing slavery didn't make abuse go away and punishing either parent or child will not end the problem. Especially when neither parent nor child understands what the problem is.

Most parents teach their children to behave in social settings. Training children about how to behave in public so that they do not stand out as abnormal is part of what every parent tries to accomplish with their children. It's called socialization. Parents and teachers of children "with" ADHD usually fail. As so many adults fail in these efforts, child development specialists name the child as having an affliction, with a name, because blaming so many parents and teachers for failing to teach their children would bring wrath upon the specialists.

Social scientists and practitioners know that to blame a parent for something the parent knew nothing about, including knowing nothing about how to cope with a situation they didn't understand in the first place, is a dangerous road.

As is the case so often with "unacceptable" human behaviours (that is, socially unacceptable), children with ADHD come to be labelled as problem children, children with behavioural problems, even "bad seeds," kids who have some strange, poorly understood and badly managed illness. It's easier to blame kids because they can't fight back or defend themselves as parents can and do.

Though ADHD has three subtypes, primarily too impulsive, primarily lacking in ability to give attention to situations in their environment, or a combination, most kids with ADHD are identified as fussy, fidgety and flighty. The quick-fix for adults is to claim the kids have a problem, give the problem a name, then recommend drug therapy. Ever since amphetamines lost their panache as a drug of choice for recreational use (known as speed) in the 1960s, they have gained new life within the medical community with names such as Ritalin (methylphenidate).

Ritalin and other medications prescribed by pediatricians calm kids. They make the kids more "normal," meaning they dull the brain so much the behaviours of the children make them less distinguishable from others of their peers who do not have a problem with exhibiting socially unacceptable behaviour. In the case of ADHD kids, drugs accomplish what social training by parents and grandparents does with most children, make them behave in public or in a social situation.

This is where my proposal differs from the most commonly used treatments for ADHD. Rather than using drugs or other therapies in an attempt to make ADHD kids more "normal," I propose that we raise the level and style of education to match their needs. ADHD children "misbehave" because they find themselves like caged animals in their intellectual development. Give them what they require in their own peculiar intellectual development stream and they will act more like "normal" kids.

Children develop in four main ways: intellectually, physically, socially and emotionally (psychologically). Put a few kids together and give them a little space and they will devise games that have a physical component and usually a social component (in their interaction). They develop emotionally or psychologically by making their way through problems, conflicts and hurts, often with the help of adults.

Most kids will incorporate some sort of intellectual component in their play. With simple games such as hide and seek, it's figuring out how to reach "home" without being discovered in their chosen hiding place. With tag, it's how to stay away from the person who is "it" and how to tag someone else when it's their own turn to be "it." That's problem solving, an important intellectual skill. Some children require more than the usual amount of intellectual stimulation.

What might someone you recognize as a genius have been like as a child? Say, Albert Einstein, as an example. Could Einstein possibly have been a normal kid at the age of four, unrecognizable from others his own age? His brain could not possibly have developed rapidly when he reached university age such that he moved to Switzerland to suddenly understand relativity and special relativity. He had to have been different as a young child as well. He must have behaved differently from other kids, as pretty well all kids who grow to be outstanding adults did.

On one occasion I remember reading a statement that Einstein believed each child is born with genius, but we train it out of most of them within their first few years of life. Sorry, I have not been able to find the actual wording of the statement, or even to confirm that Einstein made it. When you think about it, that is not the kind of statement of truth we might want to popularize because it would destroy much of what we have come to believe is good parenting and good educating. We don't want to believe we intentionally or knowingly make kids dumb. In general, western thought believes that children are born dumb (not just without knowledge) and parents and teachers smarten them up as they grow and mature.

Einstein's brain was different from the brains of most people. Larger? No, it was actually a bit smaller than the average, at 2.9 pounds. However, his brain, as examined after his death (it was removed from his body a few hours after his ultimate breath) was structured differently. I submit that Einstein's brain developed differently from the brains of most people according to the stimulus he received as a child and adolescent, not due to accidents of nature. Today we know of brain plasticity, of the ability of people to retrain their brains at any age, even in old age, of the brain's ability to restructure itself at any time if the stimulus is right.

A brain, if stimulated with new and novel thoughts and habits, will grow new neural connections, even in non-conventional parts of the brain. People blind from birth, for example, have the optical parts of their brains taken over with uses and thinking involving the other senses. A blind person may not be able to hear better than a sighted person, but he may be able to process more incoming sound information than the average sighted person. The brain of an older person can change shape with new and repeated intellectual activity just as much as that of a teenager, though the teen's brain usually changes shape faster. That's brain plasticity.

The stimulus for intellectual development was right for Albert Einstein as a child. He would not be labelled as a child with ADHD today because his intellectual needs in early childhood were met. It's behaviour, not physiology, that causes kids to be labelled as having ADHD. The brain may change shape and create new neural networks based on repeated experiences and habits of a child whose intellectual development is impeded, thus creating a child "with" ADHD.

If this is true, then we should be able to change conditions for fussy children so they will be intellectually fulfilled, so they won't need to be fussy. So they can be as intellectually blessed earlier in life as some grow to be as adults.

The intellectual needs of some children in their early years are not met sufficiently. What could a child do about that? The kid can't express his need because he has not developed the intellectual capacity to understand it. Human kids even have trouble expressing their need for touch from their parents, a critically important component of their emotional development, so it's no surprise they couldn't express their need for more intellectual stimulation.

So they fuss. And they fidget. And sometimes they fight. They can't follow the painfully slow teaching style in their classroom, so they quickly become distracted. If there is nothing to interest them intellectually nearby, they devise ways to involve others. They misbehave. At home, they have the same environment day after day, which they come to think of as boring, so they act out. They scream, they pound, they send us signals we misinterpret. We think they should just "be good." Like we adults are.

What would you do if your brain were imprisoned, such as if you became a quadriplegic who couldn't speak? Some people say they would rather die than to live in a body that would not allow them to speak, to write, to communicate, even to move. A child doesn't consider dying because he doesn't even have a clear understanding about what living is yet. He just feels frustrated and anxious. So he acts the way he feels. That is very uncomfortable and anxious.

Fussing, fighting and acting out at least get him attention, which may not be as satisfying as good intellectual stimulation but it's something different, a change from boring.

We in the 21st century still believe that babies are born stupid and only learn to be smarter as they approach adulthood. The same way they develop physically. That way of thinking is wrong. In fact, it's backwards.

In the first six years of life, a child's brain acts like an enormous sponge--even a vacuum cleaner--soaking up everything, absolutely everything it can. Good stuff, bad stuff, everything, because it can't distinguish good from bad, useful from useless. For the most part, a child's intellectual development in their first six years is left up to young parents who have extremely little knowledge about what a child needs and how it develops. Babies don't get a chance to choose their parents. A young child's brain may not have much experience or knowledge, but it's supercharged for intellectual learning experiences.

Why did my sister, who grew up in a similar family environment as I did, develop ADHD? Half a century ago, a child growing up in a relatively unstimulating environment needed more, but had no way to get it. In our family there were no books, no reading to them by a parent, no television (at least of the kind that would be intellectually stimulating for a child), not even access to radio programs that were not geared to adult interests. My sister had such constant needs for intellectual stimulation that were never met that her brain automatically jumped from one focus to another seeking fulfillment. She didn't "apply herself" people said, her teachers repeated on report cards.

The closest she got in her 54 years of life to intellectual fulfillment was when she acted in several musical plays in senior elementary school. She was very good, quite talented, but she received no encouragement, no praise, no support from home. She never grasped how to move to the next stage with what she had learned. No one taught her. As she got older, she accepted an addiction as a substitute, as an emotional surrogate to intellectual excitement, in her case smoking cigarettes. Eventually it killed her, as it did our father and mother. Maybe it wasn't the addiction that was genetic, but the common condition of lacking intellectual stimulation at the right times.

Why did I, who grew up in the same environment--in fact with absolutely no intellectual stimulation for my first six years--not develop ADHD? For reasons still unclear, my brain had a problem processing information, right from birth. Maybe it was a lack of oxygen from blood not reaching my brain for the short period of time it took me to be born breech. (Some claim I have been ass-backwards ever since.) Maybe I inherited a condition whereby my brain functioned much slower than those of other babies. To this day I think and write slowly. I know the condition existed in my father's family.

My brain worked so slowly as a child that I had time to invent, to create, to use my imagination. With never a toy, a child or even a parent to play with, at the age of three I created an imaginary pet. As the only animals I knew were those I saw on the rare occasions I was taken out of our apartment over a store in a lonely farming community--in my case the animals I saw were cattle--I adopted an imaginary cow. The earliest memory I have of my father making a pronouncement about me was when he whispered to my mother that he thought I must be retarded because I had an imaginary pet. What else did my brain have to do but to imagine? He didn't know and didn't realize that it was a problem he should have addressed. A problem I addressed as best I could. I managed to invent a friend and intellectual stimulation.

How about my nephew, son of my wife's sister, the kid who should have developed ADHD but didn't? I remember watching (and listening to) this kid scream at the top of his lungs at the age of 10 months. He was learning to walk. Every time he stood up for a few seconds, he would lose his balance as he let go of a chair and fall down. He hated that. Most babies just keep at it until they master the skills of standing unsupported and walking. My nephew screamed because he was frustrated with himself. He knew he could learn how to walk, but the secret of balance eluded him. He had something important to learn, but he couldn't do it. He despised the fact that he was being held back by his own uncoordinated body.

I told his mother that he was just angry with himself because he couldn't master what he wanted to do, what everyone he knew could do, walk. She knew he was extraordinarily eager to learn. She and her husband fed the intellectual needs of their son admirably. Today, with full support and guidance from home whenever he needs it, the lad gets school awards, wins at sports, succeeds at everything he attempts. He knows he needs intellectual fulfillment and he knows where to find it. Fortunately, he attends a public elementary school that is extraordinary in many ways, one that feeds the intellectual, social and emotional needs of its young charges far beyond what other schools offer. Far beyond what the curriculum asks. Far beyond what most schools would dare or be allowed to do.

Christopher doesn't have ADHD because he got what he needed, both at home and at school. Some day he may find a cure for cancer or develop the mysterious Theory of Everything that Einstein sought all his adult life. Chris is a genius because nobody prevented him from being one. He doesn't even know it yet because no one has told him. What he knows is that life is filled with potential.

Nobody in his life thought that he should conform, to be average, to be like other kids, and insisted on it. The people closest to him thought he should be who he could be. They may have wanted him to be quieter, but rather than punish him for being boisterous or aggressive, they fed his need for new knowledge and skills.

He learned at a blistering pace and he will continue to do so because he knows he can. He can learn as much and as fast as he wants, on any subject of his choosing.

This is not the time for blame, to point the finger at those who have prevented so many other kids from becoming geniuses, from becoming the best they could be. This is the time to change our ways so we no longer dumb-down most kids so they can become obedient employees and consumers as adults.

We have the opportunity to make the 21st century better than any before it. It won't hurt anyone and it should benefit everyone. We just need to do some things differently. It won't be hard. One thing we can do is to provide better stimulation for the intellectual development of young children. That's actually easy because most adults know these things anyway, they just don't know they should be teaching them to their children. We also need to teach new parents (or pre-parents) what they should know about child development and needs.

Let's not wait until Chris is old enough and wise enough to make a difference in the world himself. Let's get started now. ADHD is the label we give to kids with more extreme behaviours of unsatisfaction. The less extreme ones we simply call bratty.

As if young children want to be that way. They don't. They really don't.

Writing this article has already made a difference for me. It has always mystified me why my wife had trouble in high school, sometimes has great difficulty following written directions, often can't follow spoken directions requiring more than one separate action, forgets many things I wish she could remember but has a memory like a steel trap for other things and can learn well with certain teaching methods but fails badly with others. In grade school she was smart. In high school she was made to feel dumb, as if she had hit her intellectual "wall."

I now understand that my wife has an undiagnosed form of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder that is sufficiently mild that it stayed beneath the radar of educators and employers throughout her school and working life. Now that she has become aware of it, she can learn how to cope with and make compensations for her ADHD. For me, my wife's unusual behaviour in some situations now makes sense. I can adjust to what I can understand.

Those who lose a foot in a childhood accident learn to conduct their lives differently from most of us because they know they are missing a foot. Those who have ADHD could cope better if they had the necessary direction and skills. Parents who understand ADHD can provide opportunities for intellectual development of their children so they will never become "bad kids."

We can each adjust to the strange behaviour of those we encounter if we understand why they act the way they do. Otherwise they may be punished for acting different or strange. I have not conducted a study, nor have I been able to find research to support or deny this proposal, but I suspect prisoners and adults under medical care for mental or emotional problems would be found to be overrepresentated with ADHD in comparison with the general population.

This is not a scientific hypothesis, but merely an observation. Might our modern insistence upon instant gratification, instant rewards, the frenetic struggle through the "rat race," our desire to find drugs to quick-fix our health after a self-destructive lifestyle harmed it, our seeking of thrills through risky behaviours and addictive indulgences and our habit of finding someone to blame for everything that we don't like be symptoms of culture-wide ADHD on an unimaginably massive scale?

We now have a place to begin, to prevent the proliferation of ADHD in the general population by addressing the intellectual needs of young children and to help those with ADHD and those they come in contact with regularly to understand and to cope with what seems to be unusual, erratic, irresponsible or careless behaviour.

We know where to begin. Let's begin now. Talk it up.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to understand how children develop and when to satisfy their needs, to encourage those streams of development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Do you wonder sometimes if Einstein didn't get sucked into a black hole somewhere and spewed out covered in some of the strange stuff he talks about other than physics?

Who can't see with their own eyes and feel with their own heart?

As it turns out, most of us.

Most of what we value in life--including what we do with the precious hours allotted to us in our own lives--we adopt from what we have hard from others. We eat more or less the same things as our neighbours and family eat. We subscribe to spiritual beliefs somewhat similar to those of others we know. We wear similar clothing to work, on the golf course, playing a sport or shopping.

Would you not think a down-and-outer bum from the street would be clearly out of place in the same pew as you at church? Yet for all you know, the "bum" may lead a more spiritually pure life than you, may help others more often than you, may even have a personal net worth far in excess of yours.

So why would the bum not belong beside you in church? Likely because you think he may embarrass you by embarrassing himself, meaning that you care what others think about you when you sit in the same church pew as a bum in ragged, dirty and smelly clothing.

Surely when we fall in love we feel with our own heart more clearly than we do with emotions at other times in our lives. That's a one-to-one thing that only involves two people (only one if the love is unrequited, but let's consider two the norm). Two people who love each other deeply care only about themselves. It's not selfish so much as self centred, or a universe of only two people.

Yet how do we find and choose such a person? Most often we use standards or guidelines passed on to us from others. Most times we won't get involved with someone our friends or family can't stand. Because their opinion matters. We use other standards to measure potential mates, but we usually acquire them from others.

The "deeply in love" stage is limited in most long term relationships. It's known as the romantic phase. It usually lasts from six weeks to eight months, depending on the people involved and circumstances. By the time a year has passed in any relationship, the romantic phase is over and a couple has moved on to a deeply bonded relationship. Romantic gestures may continue, but the hormonal rush of romance will have tapered off to something more manageable. If the relationship continues, both members will be sizing up where they want it to go and where the other may be prepared to have it go.

The act of sizing up where we want a relationship to go is largely determined by what others tell us. Nothing in nature tells us it's time to evaluate. Lots of effects in our lives do just that. I'm reminded of how often that happened in the popular television series Friends, where relationships ended because one couldn't meet the evaluation tests of the other.

When do we act on our own, using our own eyes to provide independent evidence to our brain so that it can make up its mind (pun noted) without influence from outside? When do we act only according to the dictates of our heart, without letting anyone else express their opinions, however well intentioned? In fact, not that often.

We are not just social animals who require the attention and approval of others in our social circle, we are also individuals who need others in our lives to provide validation, approval, love and other aspects of social intercourse. We are not rock or islands in the stream. Nor can we be for long. We each function within a particular social milieu. Stepping outside of it by making totally independent choices may jeopardize our membership in the group.

Einstein was right. We rarely make independent decisions, with our eyes or out hearts. Usually it's because we can't afford to be so independent.

So are well all slaves to each other? Or to someone who is effectively our master? No. Slavery today, in the free world, is a matter of choice.

What we must do sometimes is balance off what others want us to do and think with what we believe is best for us. When we decide to act independent of the wishes and advice of others who care about us, we need good communication skills to express our feelings in ways that will not offend or alienate them.

Sure it's hard. So was relativity for Einstein. But what else have you got to do with your life than to get better at it?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want children to be able to make wise decisions as they grow up, to be able to balance the intricacies of life so that they can be happy and get along well with those they want to hold dear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Stuff You Should Know About Money

First of all, money does not have and was never intended to have any intrinsic value. Anyone who values money for its own sake ("The king is in his counting house counting out his money") has a mental illness.

Money was invented (some form of it dates back 5000 years) as a convenient way to equalize exchanges, such as payment for work done or to balance out a barter exchange.

The gathering of people into villages and towns created the first need (after defence of the tribe) for public services, which meant taxes. Egypt and Mesopotamia exacted taxes in the form of goods and labour five millennia ago. By 2500 BCE they had begun to accept silver and gold bars as currency--the pyramids were not built by those who could afford to buy their way out of service to the pharaoh.

Religious temples were the first banks. Currency made theft easier, more convenient. Temples were the biggest and most secure structures in the ancient world, so they became the places to store money and other valuables.

Temple priests were the first bankers, ensuring their personal security by 1750 BCE by making loans to followers who needed cash for a short term. Mortgages, especially of the sub-prime variety, were still a long way in the future.

The world's oldest surviving bank, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, was founded as a pawn shop in Italy, in 1472.

Paper money goes back much further, at least in China. The emperors issued paper currency in China as early as 910 CE, three centuries before Marco Polo arrived.

Though suitably impressed with the concept of paper currency, Marco was alarmed at how much of it the emperor of the day, Kublai Khan, was printing. The Khan, trying to generate enough wealth to pay for an invasion of Japan (and eventually to conquer all of the eastern world), caused inflation to soar.

Of the tens of thousands of boats he sent to Japan, almost every one sank in a typhoon, never reaching the shores of Japan, because they were built in a cheaper style of a kind suitable for travelling on rivers, not seas. His power and influence in China never recovered.

China ended its first attempt at paper currency in the 15th century as the country exhausted itself through inflation caused by printing too much money. China, the most powerful and innovative country in the world, with explorations to every part of the globe and trading partners in all popular ports, ended its exploratory and trading ventures around the world (crippling the shipping industry) after the Kublai Khan debacle.

The U.S. learned how convenient it was to print money for Civil War costs when it created the "greenback" in July, 1861. After the war, the value of the U.S. dollar had decreased, but the Confederate dollar was worthless.

The U.S. today has about $829 billion in coin and paper money in general circulation. Two-thirds of it is held in other countries.

A study of paper money around the world revealed in 2008 that U.S. cash had more cocaine residue on it than the currency of any other country. Also found on paper money were staphylococcus bacteria and fecal residue. (Don't ask. Don't tell.)

Around 1916, a U.S. citizen could carry his cash to Washington, D.C. and have it washed, ironed and reissued. I wonder why...oh, right.

The old saying that money doesn't grow on trees is correct. U.S. bills are 75 percent cotton, 25 percent linen. Some countries use at least some man-made fibres. Expect some plastic to appear in "paper" money soon.

As counterfeiting has been a booming enterprise since money was invented (some of us are old enough to remember having to bite some coins to ensure they weren't counterfeits loaded with lead), mints have to continually invent new ways to counteract it. The latest U.S. five dollar bill has more than 650,000 tiny glass domes that create an optical illusion the government hopes will be impossible (or at least economically unfeasible) to duplicate.

Poor Frank X. McNamara. Back in 1949 he took friends out to dinner in New York City, then realized to his shock that he had forgotten his cash when it came time to pay up. He promised himself to never find himself in a position like that again. He invented the first credit card, Diner's Club.

The first Diner's Club card wasn't plastic, but cardboard. It listed the 14 restaurants who were prepared to accept the card on the back. It had an annual fee of three dollars.

John Shepherd-Barron, a Scottish inventor, gets the credit for inventing the first true ATM. He created it in 1967 for Barclay's Bank in North London. His concept was based on the same technology as chocolate bar dispensers.

Since plastic cards had still not appeared, Shepherd-Barron's machine accepted only specialized cheques that were dotted with identifying traces of radioactive carbon-14.

Um, radioactive? Yup. Shepherd-Barron claimed that users of the Barclay's cheques "would have to eat 136,000" of them to have any dangerous effects.

Once a specialized Barclay's cheque was entered into his ATM, the user would key in a four digit PIN to confirm identification.

And so began the age of having to remember passwords.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to address the developmental needs of their children at the right time, not too late as often happens.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

[Primary source: Discover, April 2009]

Why the Economy Is As Undependable As the Weather

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III, grandson of a likely fictional character of disputed origin, possibly Canadian (in other words, origin uncertain)

No matter where in the world people live, they all complain of the inaccuracies of their weather forecasters.

No matter where in the world people live, they are also feeling the effects of the economic downturn, despite the accumulated expertise of noted economists.

Why are weather forecasts so often wrong? In my country, Environment Canada (the government weather service) claims it is right 89 percent of the time. And it is, if you count only forecasts made within the previous three hours of any given time.

Weather and climate may follow general patterns, but they do not adhere to weather charts nor necessarily follow computerized climate models. As technologically advanced as we are in the 21st century, our meteorologists and climatologists know with certainty as much about the accuracy of their forecasts as doctors know about the human body. Which is very little despite their claims to the contrary.

Have you ever taken the time to watch dust moving around in a puddle or fog swirling on a summer morning? They defy accurate description. I have watched waves on the lake near where I used to live approach each other from opposite directions, then continue on by passing through each other as if the other weren't there at all. Shouldn't they cancel each other out? They don't. Waves are an effect of weather above them.

The economy of a country depends on so many factors that no one person or computer can keep track of them all. The current recession began when unethical bank officers granted mortgages to people who could not afford to pay them back, even though the interest rates were below the prime lending rate. The banks then sold these "loser" papers to other banks around the world, combined with good mortgage papers. Somebody had to pay. Turns out we all did.

Remember the dotcom collapses several years ago where internet startup companies collected fortunes with little more than a dream to sell? Or the Worldcom and Enron collapses (among others) where their executives stated profits and sales increases in the 30 percent range when they were only a fraction of that?

A great deal of the economy of a country depends on the honesty and integrity of those who move money around it. Stripped to its essentials, an economy functions on the greed and honesty of those with money. In the end, greed always dominates.

So weather forecasts are based on factors we don't even understand, while economic forecasts depend on the integrity of those with money. Is it any wonder that neither can be depended upon?

As for science fiction, some of it from the past may be seen in technology today?

Yet that's not the point of Throop's quote. His point is that many people will believe forecasts created by those who claim to be experts, while deriding technological and cultural forecasts from sources such as writers of science fiction. Science fiction writers don't claim to be experts.

Anyone who claims to have expertise in any subject will find followers provided that they can back up their predictions with good stories.

Weren't snake oil salesmen of the past successful because they told the best stories? Are our biggest advertisers today not successful because they tell the best lies that appeal to our vanity and need for social status? Didn't our ancestors believe the tribal chiefs and medicine men and women who told the best stories?

We tend to believe those who tell the most convincing stories, whether the stories have truth and validity or not.

So it rains on our parades and our retirement nestegg stocks tank. Our lives remain determined largely by our beliefs.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who believe what they can depend on.
Learn more at http://billallin.com 

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
- Don Marquis, American humorist, writer (1878-1937)

This applies more to the Western part of the world than to the rest where a majority of people know what they want: food and safety.

It applies as well today as it did during the lifetime of Don Marquis, who died during the Great Depression.

Why do so many of us depend on others to tell us what we should want, what we should strive for and how we should spend our lives?

Let's look at some background. Charles Darwin did not tout "survival of the fittest" as the way all animals--including humans--succeed or go extinct. That "fittest" thing is inaccurate and wrong. If that were the case, the strongest and smartest among us--including in the animal kingdom--would be more successful than the rest, which is clearly not true.

Darwin said that the most adaptable species would survive when others are dying off as conditions in their homelands change. Humans live in more and varied parts of our planet than any species other than a few that can only be seen (by us) with a microscope. We live in the frozen Arctic and on mountain sides, in jungles and deserts. Some of us have our homes on water and make our living from it. Since the beginning of the last century, a majority of us live in urban areas. We have adapted to hugely varied living conditions.

Why have so many of us recently migrated to cities? Supposedly because jobs are more plentiful and living is easier.

When the vast majority of living humans earned their living from agriculture, most people worked for themselves, in one sense or another. In cities, most people earn their income working for an employer that determines when they will work, how hard they will work, what days they will work, what they will wear at work, what equipment they will use, when they can take breaks from work, even the quality of the air they will breathe at work.

The attitude of most employers in cities today is "Take it or leave it, and if you leave someone will replace you tomorrow." Ethics and morality aside, most employees stay in their jobs because it's too hard to find other jobs. They need to have employers because they "need to eat" and to feed, clothe and shelter their families.

Recent studies have shown the stress and polluted air, both of which may be found in abundance in all large cities, shorten people's lives. People live shorter lives, even though they may have greater income than their rural countrymen, so that they can have a job, can work at a job someone else has created for them.

When a global catastrophe occurs--and it surely will--who will survive? People who live in big cities obviously have not adapted well enough to live healthier than their rural countrymen.

Look at the problems that have arisen since the downturn of national economies globally. Multitudes of people get laid off from their jobs each week, all over the world. Those people are desperate to find jobs. Because they know they can't survive on their own skills alone. They don't have the knowledge or skills to create jobs for themselves, no matter how wonderful they are at the jobs they do today.

Being able to survive on your own skills and knowledge is what adaptability is all about.

Could you survive if electric power went off in your part of the world for six months? If not, then you have not just traded your labour and skills for the produce of other people, you have sacrificed your personal incentive to survive. Survival, it is said, is one of the few instincts we human have. In cities we are breeding that instinct out of ourselves.

Those who can't adapt in times of extreme stress will die, will go extinct. When the time comes, it won't matter how physically strong you are or how smart you are. It will matter whether you can adapt to survive while others do not.

We may want to consider how successful we are as a species if almost all of us would die because we could not look after our own needs following a global catastrophe. That catastrophe could be as simple as a bad virus bringing down the major internet services of the world.

We have seen how quickly our planet is warming globally (though climate change has caused some places to be colder). The opposite--another Ice Age--could happen even faster if earth is hit by an asteroid or someone decides to set off a nuclear bomb that creates a global black cloud that lasts for years (known as "global winter" or "nuclear winter").

Remember the die-off of the dinosaurs? Some of them--the most adaptable--survived. Today we call them birds. Most died off within 1500 years of the asteroid striking Mexico's Yucatan. Fifteen hundred years is a blink of time in cosmic history.

It's time we consider teaching our children survival skills, an attitude leaning toward independence and interdependence. It's not time to be afraid. Frightened people can't adapt. They are afraid because they can't adapt. If what we really want is to survive, we need to teach that as an attitude as well.

It won't necessarily take a natural disaster of global proportions to find people scrambling to survive. We have seen recently how bad things can get when business people take advantage of weak laws and morals and some sell houses to people who can't afford subprime mortgages. It doesn't take much.

It's time for the less afraid and more adaptable among us to prepare for worse times than anyone has seen in living memory. That's not pessimistic. It's optimistic to think that some of us will survive a tragedy because we know how to adapt. True, many of us will die. But that happens in natural disasters frequently. We have adapted to that. As Darwin predicted, the less adaptable will perish.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach skills about survival, knowledge of survival techniques and an attitude to treat adapting to changing conditions positively to their children and loved ones.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Much misconstruction and bitterness are spared to him who thinks
naturally upon what he owes to others, rather than on what he ought
to expect from them.
- Elizabeth de Meulan Guizot, French author (1773-1827)

What do I owe to others? What do you owe to others? What do I owe to you?

Should anyone even care?

Yes.

To begin, those who are fully aware of what they should expect from others will always be disappointed. If nine people out of ten they meet do exactly as they expect, these people--the expectors--will remember the tenth. The tenth, the violator of norms the expectors expect of others, will stand out in their memories like the proverbial sore thumb.

That's human nature. The behaviour that violates norms is not just remembered, but is often held up as indicative of the kind of person who does "that kind of thing." We tend to forgive ourselves our misdeeds before we are prepared to forgive others. A generalization, to be sure, but still typical of human nature.

Tell a lie and it may take you decades of truth telling to overcome the memory others have of that lie. Violate the fidelity of marriage and it will result in divorce in most cases. Fail to live up to a promise you made may cost you a friendship, or a customer, or the trust of who knows how many people who learn about it. Yet it's in the nature of humans to tell the occasional lie, in their hormonal and instinctive makeup to seek more than one sexual partner, and it's often nothing more than memory failure or being too busy that causes people to fail to fulfill their promises.

Putting too much emphasis on what we expect of others is fundamentally fraught with failure.

Think now about someone you know who offers a lot of himself or herself to help others. That person is usually (but not universally) loved and respected. There will always be those who resent what such givers accomplish and the respect and accolades they may receive because they are jealous. But jealousy and envy are sicknesses that fortunately live in few people.

Do I owe something to you? Well, you may say, I owe you a good read since you took the time to read this. From my point of view, I spent over five decades of my life actively learning from others, while having little to offer them in return. By writing this article and many others, I share what I have learned as a way of paying forward what others gave to me over so many years.

I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. To a great extent, that happiness is based on what I learned from others. In some cases, what I learned from them was how to cope with misfortune and errors. In others it was how to do things I had never tackled before and to see them through to completion and success. If I share that with you, you have a better chance of achieving what I have, of feeling the way I feel.

I can't make you happy. I can only point you in the right direction. Your motivation must come from within you. If you focus on how others disappoint you, you will often be disappointed, have negative feelings about others and the world in general. If you focus on what you might do to make their lives a little better, you will have successes. Some greater than others, that's true. Some successes you may never learn about because the others involved moved on before changing their lives.

But you will know.

More than gratitude and self satisfaction result from helping others. It takes time and many instances of helping. But something happens within you that changes your life forever. I don't want to be specific about what this mystery is because I don't want you to use it as an incentive to help others. Do that because it's the right thing to do.

Doing that kind of right thing feels good. Try it if you haven't. Do more if you have. If the latter, you will understand the mystery already.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy and well balanced children who will take better care of their world, their families and their lives than their ancestors did.
Learn more at http://billallin.com